The Bastard Manifesto

like Crimes against Potatoes. Well that's actually totally fair. Um, but that introduction, uh does tie in, yeah, slightly with with today's episode. Uh so you know, first off, Jamie Loftus, you are our guest today. How you doing? Jamie co hosted the Bechel Cast the the creative mind behind Boss Whom Is Girl? Which is going to be in Edinburgh probably by the time this episode drops. The most entertaining show I've been to in like the last ten years.

Fly to Edinburgh. I've several times, and if you listen to this years later and Jamie Loftus is not in Edinburgh, fly to Edinburgh and demand that they take her back, Like what happened there? Yeah, there's yeah, yeah yeah, force it upon the town fathers of Edinburgh. I mean really optimistic for you to even mention as a possibility as a time period that will exist. Yeah. Well I'm an optimist. I'm not I'm not well, I don't know, I'm a

I'm a mix of both, I guess. So today, normally this is a show where I talk about the very worst people in all of history. But today we're doing something a little bit different. We are getting very much behind the bastards because we're going into some prehistory about where authoritarianism comes from, where fascism comes from, how it might be kind of programmed into our brains to an

extent um. This is kind of a weird one, and it's based on you know, I read about primarily dictators and terrible unethical political leaders and corporate leaders, people who abuse power, uh, basically as a more than full time job, and having done that for a year and change, you start to have some ideas about the nature of power and the nature of authoritarianism and the possibilities of the

human race and stuff. Um, So this is like, uh, it's not a half asked but it's maybe three quarters of an asked attempt at me putting some of that together and explaining some of the conclusions I've drawn, uh from all of this research, and uh it's not ready for public consumption, but I'm gonna put it out there anyway because I'm a hack and a fraud. So that's

where we are. I've got Sophie and Jamie in the room to tear me down if if what I'm saying some nonsense, and Anderson and Anderson, this would be really fun if your conclusions were actually I was being kind of dramatic before power is actually really good and I'm going to work for cook Industries. Bye bye. This this ends on a on a pro Saddam Hussein rant, Robert you know what, leave Yeah, I've become a Stalinist. Yeah, oh god, I just want to hear you refer to

yourself as a bit of a drama queen. Turns out this year I've just been a bit of a drama queen and things are actually fine. He's like, I've just been binging Mary Kay and Nashley. You know, that's my

new life. As I learned from Mary Kay and Ashley, Everything's fine as long as you as long as you light to your wait, Mary Kay, I was too busy trying to remember exactly what had happened in uh in that movie where they trick their parents into both getting on a cruise ship with them to make their divorced mom and dad get back together. Buddy gun one, isn't that one? That that is? Isn't that uh parent trap? Parent trap? Yeah? Not Mary Kane? Actually not actually twins,

that's double Lindsay Lohan. Yeah, and as I miss, wait, was that Lindsay lohunt? That wasn't even Mary Kay? And Nactually, goddamn it. I know I think about the such a that I tried to mention Ariana Grande in casual conversation last year, and you waited maybe a full ten seconds by being like, I don't know who you're talking. I actually bring that up thinking about it once a week.

I bring it up constantly with salespeople when they asked me why Robert can't pronounce normal words, and I give them the explanation that he can pronounce some crazy Russian ship but cannot pronounce Ariana Grande. See this is frustrating because I feel like if you, if you add up the number of words that I read every week on this show, I have above a pronunciation rate. Someone crunched those numbers. Yeah, I mean we're talking about ten thousand

ish words a week. You know, you get a couple wrong mistakes are made, but usually the words are like tree, t look we I love tries and I pronounced them route. Why did you let us come on the show together? We're not going to get anything done. I needed I needed some ship talking of my my, my philosophizing here, because if I'm going to do an episode where I unload of a half baked philosophy, somebody should be there to like point out when I've made a huge logical

error or pronounce a name wrong. Okay, this actually will tie in with something we talked about later in the episode. I didn't plan that ahead of time, but it totally does. And I'm very proud of myself of now. So let's get into it. In nineteen eighty nine, Francis fuku Yama, a political scientist and author, wrote an essay titled the End of History Looking forward just a little bit. He was able to see the fall of the Soviet Union was on the very near horizon. To fuku Yama and

too many. At the dawn of the nineteen nineties, it looked as if a new epoch in human society was dawning, one in which the great historical shifts between empires and modes of government that had persisted for EON's would cease, because mankind had clearly arrived at the perfect system, liberal democracy.

So that's Fukuyama's thinking in like nineteen eighty nine. Now he turned his essay into a book in nineteen ninety two, after the fall of the USSR, when he looked like he basically read the future UH in the end of history. He wrote that humanity was witnessing quote not just the passing of a particular period of post war history, but the end of history is such that is the endpoint of mankind's ideological evolution, and the universalization of Western liberal

demonocracy is the final form of human government. So a bit of a bold claim to make UH and a little less than thirty years later, in the Year of Our Lord twenty nineteen, fuki Yama's theories have not aged well. Rather than living at the end of history, we now seem to be living through a period where these once in vulnerable liberal democracies are dropping faster than fat beats at a warehouse. Rave. Thank you, thank you for that, Jamie. That's proud of that one. Under Victor Orban, Hungary has

transitioned to what he calls an illiberal democracy. Under tap resign uh, Turkey has moved very close to an outright dictatorship. The elections of JayR. Bolsonaro in Brazil and Rodrigo du Terte in the Philippines hardly bode any better, But the situation is actually even worse than it looks. Based on all that, researchers with a German institute, Bertelsman stiff Tong published a study back in March of two eighteen that analyzed the quality of democracy, the market, economy, and leadership

of some hundred and twenty nine nations. They use this to put together what they called a transformation Index that roughly analyze the overall levels of freedom, authoritarianism, and inequality in those societies. They found that roughly one billion more people live under dictatorships now than did fifteen years ago. Wow, that's insane. Yeah, it's not a great statistic. I don't like that. M hmm. That's all I have to say

about it. That's my only comment. Not into it. Okay, Sophie, not a dictatorship fan, bold stance to take considering honestly, brave of you. I mean we can add to that because I feel like our relationship Robert is a dictatorship and I am that dictator. Yes, in which direction nothing would surprise me. And like Stalin, you regularly throw oranges at me and make me watch Cowboy movies while you drink. I've seen it. Yeah, absolutely, I hate to see it

and I see it. Yeah, but you are I mean that you are my son, and I accept you for who you are. Yeah, except for when I don't want to watch Cowboy movies. Yeah, not acceptable. Then that's not acceptable. So uh yeah. So these guys look into the number of people living in dictatorships and how that's changed, and they find out that there's a billion more people living under such regimes now than we're fifteen years ago. I've had a write up of this study in the Local,

which is a German newspaper. Quote. Well, the researchers concluded that the number of people living in democracies rose from four billion to four point two billion between two thousand and three and two thousand seventeen. They also found that three point three billion people lived under dictatorship last year compared to two point three billion in two thousand three.

So the trends aren't good. Uh. It is said that the number of countries classified as having exemplary standards of free and fair elections had dropped from one in six and two thousand six to one in fourteen last year. And while seventeen of the hundred and twenty nine countries were considered to have completely unrestricted freedom of press and opinion in two thousand six, that was the case for just ten countries last year. Okay, so we're not We're not on a great trend line if you you want

to look at history that way. Um. Now, in every era there are philosophers whose purpose seems to be to reinforce in the minds of the great and good that whatever systems put them in their lofty place are right and decent and perfect. What would you, Francis fuki Yama was that man cheering the victors of the Cold War on and assuring them that their world order would persist for all time, And now that mankind seems to be

sinking into a darker and more authoritarian era. A new philosopher has arrived to praise the righteousness of this shift. His name is Dr Jordan Peterson. Stand about, I was having a perfectly lovely conversation. Yeah, we were having a conversation while you were talking, and then I got the Jordan Peterson momo and I had just had a sharp pain. But before we get into that sharp pain, what would all what would what would you sell the Lofty Place? What would you sell at the Lofty Place with a

whole sorts of ship? I mean it would be and also none of it would be It would be I think probably a front for something else. Like it would be mostly I don't even know. I'm not I'm not a very good consumerwards, So yeah, it would be a shop for Okay, no, it's just supposed to be a shop, but it's actually a trap. Um so i'll, you know, like lure in like sword guys and capture Mark Zuckerberg. Yeah, exactly,

like guys who own swords. And then it's really kind of like a re education kind of thing, and the doors snap and then I teach the sword guys a thing or two about a thing or two, and then they leave mentally healthier. I can respect that. Back to Jordan Peterson, well, I mean speaking of sword guys, he

kind of ties in there. But he also ties into authoritarianism because in his best selling book Twelve Rules for Life and Antidote to Chaos, Dr Peterson argues that strict hierarchies are natural and healthy, at least to some extent, according to a write up in the conversation quote. To prove his point, Peterson uses the example of lobsters, which

humans share a common evolutionary ancestor with. Peterson argues that, like humans, lobsters exist in hierarchies and have a nervous system attuned to status, which runs on serotonin, a brain chemical often associated with feelings of happiness. But higher up a hierarchy of lobster climbs, This brain mechanism helps to make more serotonin available. The more defeat it suffers, the

more restricted the serotonin supply. Lower serotonin is in turn associated with more negative emotions, perhaps making it harder to climb back up the ladder. According to Peterson, hierarchies and humans work in a similar way. We are wired to live in them. So that's Dr Peterson, And as much as I might personally find him frustrating a disagreeable. He's not the only person making arguments like this, do we

have a sea? Do we have a second source? I just don't like his We've got other sources and and yeah, unfortunately we have other sources. Uh. There's a distressing amount of data that reinforces the idea that strict hierarchy may be more natural to humankind than the egalitarian future those of us who grew up watching Star Trek the next generation might prefer. In two thousand eight, a scientific study on a hierarchy and the human brains started making the rounds.

Online websites like PBS News Hour summarize it with headlines like this, social status is hardwired into the brain, study shows The research this article and others like it discussed was based on a study conducted by the National Institute of Mental Health using an FMR I to measure the brain activity of seventy two people playing a computer game with financial rewards on the line. According to the press release quote, there were assigned a status that they were

told was based on their playing skill. In fact, the game outcomes were predetermined by the other players simulated by computer participants intermittently saw pictures and scores of an inferior and a superior player they thought were simultaneously playing in other rooms. Although they knew the perceived players scores would not affect their own outcomes a reward, and were instructed to ignore them. Participants brain activity and behavior were highly

influenced by their position in the implied hierarchy. Now I found a more detailed breakdown of that study by an actual scientist, Dr. Kabiz Kamrani, writing on anthropology dot net, and he notes quote Overall, this observation implies that social status is highly valued in our subconscious minds, even as much as money. The press is gorging itself on the sound bite they just love it when something is complex as social hierarchy and brain functions are reduced to something

as simple as gaining money. Another interesting observation involved subjects that were presented a superior competitor in the game. When that happened at triggered activity in quote, an area near the front of the brain that appears to size people up,

making interpersonal judgments and assessing social status. A circuit involving the midfront part of the brain that processes the intentions and most motives of others and emotion processing areas deep in the brain activated when the hierarchy became unstable, allowing for upward and downward nobility. That it is the prefrontal cortex is the judge bitch cortex. Y Dr Camrani goes on to write, these results kind of thwart any utopian

anarchists out there. This data shows that are hierarchical consciousness seems to be ingrained in the human brains so much so that there are distinct circuits activated by concerns over social rank. So like, so like, what what kind of a study is this? Like did he how many? It's

an f M r I studies. So they're doing these sort of things to try to make put people in situations where they would be specifically like maybe lad to think about their rank in a hierarchy, and they're also measuring their brains at the same time, and they're finding that, like, because of the way that people's brains react in these studies, it suggests that parts of our brain are hardwired um to view ourselves in part of a social hierarchy, as

opposed to like human beings inherently being egalitarian and social hierarchy being something that's falsely imposed on us from outside, Like the structure of our brain, uh, seems to reinforce hierarchy. And do we know is there like are we pulling from like a wide group of yeah, a sample, yeah, not samples. This is this is just one study, um, but there are other studies that have found similar things that its specific study does, say the sample size of

the group that he did. Yeah, this one's I think a seventy two persons study, this most recent one here. Um. But there's like this is this is like sort of emblematic of one sort of strain of research, and there's a couple of other studies in it that talk about, um,

hierarchy and stuff. So it's not I'm not trying to present this as like the end all be all, but it is kind of a bummer to read stuff like that, um, because it, Yeah, it would seem to push the conclusion that we are to some extent, at least irrevocably chain to hierarchy, to systems of inequality, uh and in other words,

to a world dominated by bastards. And while that would mean eternal job security for Sophie and I, it's not a worry that a world that I want to live in particularly, so I dug a little bit deeper with a little bit of desperation to it. Um, And I found evidence to suggest that our primate ants sestors, or at least many of our primate ancestors, would have been beings with strict social hierarchies. Scientists think this is plausible because many of our modern ape and monkey relatives show

evidence of this too. Gibbons are strictly monogamous, Chimpanzees have elaborate sexual hierarchies, Silverback guerrillas don't exactly work out their differences in mutual self criticism sessions. UM. I'm trying not to be too absolutist with anything here, but I think it's it's fair to say, based on a lot of anthropological research, that many of the pre human primates we descended from would have behaved in similar ways, which is probably why we have brains that are to some extent

hardwired for hierarchy. UM. Now, this gets more complicated when you also slot in the fact that an increasing body of anthropological research suggests that many of our hunter gatherer ancestors would have lived in egalitarian communities. Which is the conclusion that scientists increasingly make as they study ancient man and modern hunter gatherers, who sort of are seen as

kind of a stand in for our ancestors. Um. Which kind of suggests that tens of thousands of years in our past, at some point, you know, we sort of evolved with this this like structures in our brain that kind of function the same way as like an addiction to hierarchy, and at some point in our past we got over it for a period of like thousands and thousands and thousands of years. UM. So yeah, that's interesting

to me. Now. In two thousan twelve researchers writing for the Journal of Human Nature published the results of a study into a sample of fifty three human societies in which polyandrous unions were common. Um, I see where we're going here, Robert. I don't know. This is just a little bit but not for the most part, nack is just just a little bit, just a little bit rounded

your lifestyle. I can't believe this. Now we demonstrate that although polyandry is rare, it is not as rare as commonly believed as found worldwide it and is in most common in egalitarian societies. We also argue that polyandry likely existed during yeah early human history and should be examined from an evolutionary perspective. Our analysis reveals that it may

be a predictable response. Okay, here's the thing. It's a predictable response to a high operational sex ratio favoring males, and may also be a response to high rates of male mortality and possibly male absenteees. Longer makes sense. No, no, no, no, that's not what it is. Because men in ancient societies would have died so often, it didn't make sense for people to be strictly monogamous. So you should if you're going to have men dying at a high rate because

they're out hunting stuff. It makes sense if everyone in the tribe raises all of the kids, and if people don't have strong bonds of monogamy. That's what they're saying. Um, ancient people weren't polyandrous because they were making an ethical

choice about it being more ethical than monogamy. It's just if there's a hundred and fifty of you and your tribe and people are dropping all the time because they're out fucking hunting wool and ship it doesn't make sense to like have oh his her husband died, so now her kids don't get food. Like, that's not a great way to if there's not that many of you, you just can't live that way. You gotta stay hornies, stay

frothy all the time. Yeah, Or it's it's more that like, uh, Like one of the things that's really common in particularly a lot of Latin American tribal societies is they have these beliefs about sperm that once a woman gets pregnant, every guy she has sex with after the pregnancy has

started contribute sperm that helps build the child. And so kids have multiple fathers in the tribe and that means that like if two or three of them die, you still got three or four dads, and like they're all responsible for teaching the kids certain things, which is a really logical way to have a society if there's if

you're a hunter gatherer tribe, it makes sense logic. I've never found more daddies to be I don't need there to be like girls that have or boys that have like more than one dad daddy, unless we're talking about sugar daddy culture, in which case you do you Yeah, well, I think you guys and your reaction when I started talking about polyandry does make sense to me because like I'm I'm polyamorous, and I'm I'm familiar with a lot of frustrating people in that community who will make claims

that like, oh, it's more natural. Um, it's more ethical because our ancestors did it, And it's important to not that Like, No, our ancestors, to the extent that they were polyandrous, didn't do it for ethical reasons. They did it because it was like made logical sense for the world that they lived in. Yeah, it's it's when it's

just something to tweet about. I love when I see my polyamorous friends and I and uh, you know, I'm they asked me how my monogamous relationship is going, and I'm like, oh, it's good, and they're like, well, wow, you're missing out over here, and I was like, okay, gang, let's just play the board game, all right, just do

this front, just respectful of each other. And the other thing that is important here is if we're talking about like this book Sex at Dawn, which is a really interesting book focuses a lot on one of like the polyandrous species of monkeys bnobos, but ignores that there are a lot of monogygamous species as well, So it's it's entirely possible that, like, we descend more from monogamous types of primates than we do from polyandrous types of primates.

And if that's the case, then this period of time in which most human beings were polyandrous isn't a return to It wasn't like natural for them. It was something that they evolved to do, and no more natural than like a cell phone, and like a cell phone was essentially like an adaptation people developed over time in order to increase their odds of survival, which is what I'm getting to here. It is a bigger point than polyandry.

What else can increase your chances of survival? Products and services it's an ad break, Damn they will, especially if it's dick Pills, which fits right into what we're talking about God, but also fun cook Industries, Fox News right, yeah, right, yeah, fuck like monkeys. Thanks to Dick Pills products, we're back, and I'm I'm continuing to build to my larger point,

which is gonna keep going on. So there's a two thousand fifteen study by the University College of London, which put forward the same suggestion that men and women in pre agricultural human society has likely lived in relative equality. Mark Dibble, lead author and the study, said sexual equality is one of the important changes that distinguishes humans. It hasn't really been highlighted before. So again, this guy is saying this is a change it was. It's not a

thing that came naturally to us. It's something that we adapted to for specific benefits. So these two studies are part of an surprisingly large, to me, pretty convincing body of research which makes the case both at the now standard nuclear family has not been the norm for much of human history, and that human society in the days when life was nasty, brutish and short was also a lot more equal and less exploitative than it does today, not just for reasons of the kind of sexual bonds

people had. I'm gonna quote from a Guardian report on the matter. The first real splash in this arena came from the anthropologist Lewis Morgan and his book Ancient Society. In the book, Morgan presented the results of his study of the Iroquois, a Native American hunter gatherer society, and upstate New York. The Iroquois Morgan observed lived in large family units based on polyamorous relationships, in which men and

women lived in general equality. Morgan's work had a broader audience when it was taken up by Friedrich Ingle's, most famous for being the co author of the Communist Manifesto. In his book The Origin of Family Private Property in the State, Ingles drew on Morgan's data, as well as evidence from around the world, to argue that prehistoric society

has lived in what he called primitive communism. Other anthropologists now called this fierce egalitarianism, societies where families were based on polyamory, in which in would people lived in active equality, i e. Equality is enforced. And that's the key part here. Enforced In our society, rules are enforced unevenly and imperfectly by law enforcement of varying stripes. But we all accept that most of the things we consider crimes will not be punished. Most drug users won't be busted, most men

who beat their wives won't go to jail. Roughly of murderers get away with their crimes. And I probably don't need to point out to this audience that the number of rapists who don't get punished for their crimes is way higher than UM. So we can understand that statistic, and that's you can. You can you can have a society that more or less functions with those statistics when there's hundreds of millions of you, and there's way more food than everyone needs to eat, and the margins of

survival for our social groups are pretty wide. Primitive hunter gatherer humans, however, lived in small bands of several dozen to perhaps a hundred and fifty or so at the large end of things. They lived in a world in a time in which the margins of life and death were much thinner. Their tribes could not survive people stealing food from each other or committing multiple murders. This is one of the reasons why some scientists suspect polyamory was

so common among humans in this period. And um or do I miss it? Did you say the average lifespan around this time? That's not a super useful statistic because of of of infant mortality. Like one of the mistakes a lot of people make when they think about the past is like, oh, the average lifespan was thirty five. That means that thirty year an old man. No, if you make it to thirty, you're probably gonna live to fifty or sixty at least, and seventy wouldn't even be crazy.

It's just that so many fucking babies are dying back then that it drops the average a lot. Yeah. Yeah, it's not at all weird for people who make it to thirty to live to like sixty even back then. You know, maybe fifty would be a lot more common. Sixties still really old then, but people aren't. It's not the norm to die at thirty. It's the norm to die as a baby. I mean, yeah, it's like I mean, by the time you're thirty, you're on a roll in

terms of being alive. Yes, you're probably a pretty tough son of a bitch if you make it to thirty in that kind of world, or daughter of a bastard um, although there would not have been a lot of bastards back then because societies couldn't survive them, which is the

point I'm building too. So yeah, So, ancient tribal people had a huge number of what are called leveling mechanisms that's the anthropological term, to defend themselves against dangerous members of the group and This is where I get to tell you, guys, one of my very very very very very favorite stories. Have you ever heard of the shaming of the meat? No? No, it doesn't has nothing to do with sex. It has something to do with gender,

but nothing to do with sex whatever. Richard borche Lee is a Canadian anthropologist who has spent a huge amount of time living with and studying and writing about modern hunter gatherer people's like the and the ju Juanci, both of which I'm sure I've mispronounced the names of. Like the you have to do like a weird I I can't. I just I'm not gonna be able to. But they're

the Ekong people. Uh. These are people who exist today in our modern, connected world, but the rhythms of their lives and tactics of their societies are seen by anthropologists as sort of a window into the human past. Uh. Studying them is not a perfect look at our ancestors, but it's about as good as we can get. In the nineteen seventies, Richard spent time living with the Kong, and near the end of this period embedded with them.

It just so happened to coincide with Christmas and out of a sense of festivity and a desire to express his gratitude towards the tribe for hosting him. Richard Lee bought a gigantic ox to present them so that everybody could have a sweet ass feast. Now, the ox he picked weighed twelve hundred pounds, which meant that it was enough meat for every man, woman and child among the tribues with to get like four pounds of meat. So he's like, this is fucking awesome, Like I've made this

is gonna be a great gift. This is a great way to show my gratitude to them. They're gonna love this ship. So I go a quote now from what he wrote about this experience, which is a basically an article titled Eating Christmas in the Kalahari, which you can find online. It will be in the source notes. It's a great read quote. The next morning, words spread among the people that the big solid black one was was the ox chosen by Unta my bushman name. It means

roughly whitey for the Christmas feast. That afternoon, I received the first delegation. Binnah, an outspoken sixty year old mother of five, came to the point slowly where were you planning to eat Christmas right here, I replied, a loner with others, I expect to invite all the people to eat Christmas with me. Eat what I have purchased. You have as black ox, and I am going to slaughter and cook it. That's what we were told at the well,

but refused to believe it until we heard it from yourself. Well, it's the black one, I replied expansively, although wondering what she was driving at. Oh no, ben A groaned, turning to her group. They were right. Turning back to me, she asked, do you expect us to eat that bag of bones? Bag of bones? It's the biggest ox here, big, yes, but old and fin. Everybody knows there's no meat on that old ox. What did you expect us to eat? Off it? The horns? Everybody chuckled at ben as one

liner as they walked away. But all I can manage was a weak grin. Are you wondering where this is going? You're gonna fucking you. You're gonna fucking love it. Okay, I'm excited great. Over the next several days, tribesmen and women and children would make repeated mocking gibes to Richard about the scrawny size of the enormous ox that he bought them. No, I don't know, Lee, but reading his

writing you get the fielding. He's a very open minded, friendly and hard to rattle sort of dude, which you'd expect from an anthropologist who spent his whole life like living among different tribal groups around the world. But even he started meat story, yeah, it's it's frustrating. Will they

keep harping on him? Dozens and dozens of of Like everyone in the tribe is making fun of him for days about this, So he starts to get frustrated and even angry as this goes on, and eventually some of his good friends among the tribe explained to him that this was common behavior, particularly from other members of the tribe towards their young hunters. You you just make fun of people for the shittiness of whatever they hunt, regardless of how big it is, when it's time to like

help them clean and cook it. So, in frustration and confusion, Lee asked one of his friends, why insult a man after he has gone to all that trouble to track and kill an animal, and when he is going to share the meat with you so that your children will have something to eat. Arrogance was his cryptic answer. Arrogance. Yes, when a young man kills much meat, he comes to think of himself as a chief or a big man, and he thinks of the rest of us as his

servants or inferiors. We can't accept this. We refuse one who boasts, for someday his pride will make him kill somebody, So we always speak of his meat is worthless. This way we cool his heart and make him gentle. So this is like the meat version of like humility. Yeah, this is how you enforce humility among a hunter gathered. Try. This is how you attack and fight the male ego when you can't afford to let it go out of control like it gets to do in our society. Wow. Yeah,

that's kind of beautiful. I mean, you like to text me all the time telling me that you're embarrassed by your gender, which I just wanted to bring up for no reason. I get frustrating a lot. That's nice, I mean, I do think it is also funny that it's like, Okay, how do we get through to the men. It's like, okay, let's just rap a moral and a bunch of meat and maybe they won't taste it on the way down. This is kind of very Texas by any means necessary.

I like dream texts. This story is so Robert. Now. There are some scientists who theorize that sarcasm and humor itself evolved in human culture as a leveling mechanism, as a way to cool the hearts of arrogant young men before they went mad with power. So that's like why

we have humor. That's why we have deadpools things, things have gotten mutated, but like that was its initial purpose, is to allow us to because like humor is a making fun of somebody, Insulting somebody is a way to attack them without physically fighting and getting into a physical battle where people die and are injured. So that's sort of the theory that like maybe this is kind of the evolutionary use of a sense of humor or at

least one of them. If being good at insults is just uh not attacking someone I'm a you know, fucking samurai. Well yeah, I mean there's a reason why in so many cultures around the world, like it's pretty common for people's grandmas to be like both kind of in charge of the family and also talking shit about everybody all the time, like, um, yeah, we the evolution of sarcasm is what what a what a dark road to go down? Target the other day, I said, sarcasm, it's how I hug.

I think it really speaks to your point. Uh. And also a funk that shirt and anyone that's ever worn it. It's gotten out of hand end in the modern era, but we can see where it started. Yeah, dead Pool Robert mistakes are made. Yeah. So there's a body of scientific research that suggests possessing power impacts the brain and manner similar to brain damage. Dr Keltner, a psychology professor at u C. Berkeley, is one of the scientists on

the forefront of this field of study. From the Atlantic quote, subjects under the influence of power, he found, in studies spanning two decades acted as if they had suffered a traumatic brain injury, becoming more impulsive, less risk aware, and crucially less adept at seeing things from other people's point of view. Uh. Suke Vender Opie, a neuroscientistic master University

in Ontario, recently described something similar. Unlike Keltner, who studies behaviors, Opie studies brains, and when he put the heads of the powerful and the not so powerful under a transcranial magnetic stimulation machine, he found that power in fact impairs a specific neural process, mirroring that maybe a cornerstone of empathy. Now, before we take too much out of this, there's a lot of debate about the validity of this research and the extent to which it can tell us anything about

the real world. I found an interesting neuroskeptic article that points out that power priming, which is the kind of studies that were conducted to get these results, power priming studies have real flaws when we try to apply their

lessons outside of a research context. But I think the lived experience of the I Kung and other hunter gatherers seems to support at least the conclusion that a lot of people who live on like traditional more hunter gatherers societies kind of understood that power was bad for people and it made them more dangerous to themselves and others, and that they needed to be like egalitarianism was then again, not an ethical decision. It's a defensive reaction to the

dangers of power. So I find it that interesting. I think, yeah, that that definitely tracks with a lot of That's part of why I do think that like powerful people using social media is so extremely interesting, as you can almost like see the rot on the edges of their brain. And like even like Trump aside, there's like there's so many examples of just like you can just see in

real time the brain rot forming the famous people. Yeah yeah, but I mean just like influential people who have too much money for your own good, Like you can even like social media influencers your corrosion. Well, they're chaotic, evil.

I don't even include them. But like I think, like the best example of that I've seen recently is Elon Musk's bizarre crusade against crediting artists, which is like if you had sat down with him, if he'd never gotten on Twitter, and you just sat down with him be like, oh, if you share the work of an artist you like, you should add their name to it, he would have been like, oh, yeah, of course that makes total sense. Yeah, but because of the way social media works, somebody says

that on Twitter and he just immediately attacks them. It's like this, why are you having this fight? Elon Musk? I mean, his entire online presence like it should be there should be a thesis paper on it, because it is. It's like you you can just see his brain turning to dust its very eyes, yeah, like and interest seeing. And I'm sure that that's an extension of things that have been going on, you know, since the beginning of time, but like actually getting to observe it and having people

volunteer that information to you is fascinating. I suspect I don't I can't know this, but like, if we can imagine a world in which Donald Trump never had Twitter but also still got elected president, my suspicion is that he'd suck less. Not I don't think you would have been elected without never without Twitter, But yeah, I think it's been bad for him. Yeah, I think that I had worked in his favor during the election, and then during his presidency it's been just like a giant Yeah. Yeah,

You're welcome swners for that sound effect. Back to my my theory here that I'm still building towards. There's a lot of like I'm taking you on, like the journey of just ship I've been thinking about for the last year and a half. So this is kind of like the pattern my brain has taken it as best as I can recreate my brain rot that's what we're touring.

So there's a tendency and progressive thought, and it's something that I fight against a lot to look at groups like the Iroquois and other research into our egalitarian ancestors and make the point that such forms of social organization are more natural and thus healthier than the supremely hierarchical societies we live in today. But I tend to think the evolution of leveling mechanisms like the shaming of the meat suggests kind of the opposite, well, at least not

about the healthy thing, but about it being natural. Hierarchy is natural for human beings. It's something our brains slide into without careful vigilance. Our ancestors were not egalitarian because it felt natural. They evolved to enforce egalitarianism with great vigilance as a defense mechanism against the dangers of power.

And this presents perhaps a less utopian view of man's inherent nature, but I think it also posits a more optimistic picture of our future, because if Homo sapiens beat the problems of ingrained hierarchy once, then we can fucking well do it again. Yeah, thank you. And that leads pretty naturally to my next question. If our ancestors once lived free, fucking egalitarian lives, sleeping under the stars, probably taking hell of mushrooms and not enforcing strict gender hierarchy,

wh whoa who went wrong? How did we go from all that to the last you know, ten thousand years or whatever of human history, which you know has kind of been a ship show. But but do you know what is not a ship show? Ship the products and services that support the show. Oh I was I was about to drop the ball yet again and be like, how do you mean? What do you mean? I'm Robert,

thank you, product X. We're back. So we're talking about why this egalitarian order of the human race that seems to have existed at a point in the distant past, what made it fall apart? Uh? And I found a good rite up on this subject in New Scientist magazine by a researcher named Deborah Rodgers. She cites social anthropologist Christopher Bohm, who believes the suppression of the dominance hierarchies of our primate ancestors was a quote central adaptation of

human evolution. Bom thinks we would not have spread across the world without the adaptation of egalitarianism. He notes, inequality did not spread because it is a better system for our survival. So why then, did inequality eat the world? Well, that's a question that's been posed by a number of histories. Great thinkers. Jean Jacques Rousseau theorized in seventeen fifty four that inequality started with the idea of prime at property.

Social Darwinists in the eighteen hundreds thought that inequality was the inevitable result of the struggle of survival of the fittest, in which the more fit and almost inevitably white people formed a natural aristocracy by dint of their evolutionary success. But this thinking has continued to evolve in the twentieth century. According to Deborah Rogers quote, by the mid twentieth century,

a new theory began to dominate. Anthropologists including Julian Steward, Leslie White, and Robert Carniro offered a slightly different versions of this following story. Population growth mean we needed more food, so we turned to agriculture, which led to surplus and the need for managers and specialized roles, which in turn led to corresponding social classes. Meanwhile, we began to use up natural resources and needed to venture ever further afield

to seek them out. This expansion bread conflict and conquest, with a conquered becoming the underclass. The more recent explanations have expanded on these ideas. One line of reasoning suggests that self aggrandizing individuals who lived in lands of plenty ascended the social ranks by exploiting their surplus, first through feasts or gift giving, and later by outright dominance at the group level, argues and argue anthropologist Peter Richardson and

Robert Boyd. Improved coordination and division of labor allowed more complex societies to outcompete the simpler, more equal societies from a mechanistic perspective. Others argued that once inequality took hold, is when uneven resource distribution benefited one family more than others, it's simply became ever more entrenched. The advent of agriculture and trade resulted in private property inheritance and larger trade networks,

which perpetuated and compounded economic advantages. So it's like when you're in college and you have to do a group project and you have some people that are either like not available or like bad or and then you have the people that are busy bodies and want to do everything. And then you have the people that you know, have the special tutors, so they know how to do everything because they have help. And then you people get a better grade and then things, people get jobs, people don't

get's like college. It's like college. It's a group. Or do you leave sad and in debt and you may or may not get a job, and you probably are not getting a job in the thing you studied. Or it's like college, and that the people who didn't go wound up without tens of thousands of dollars in debt, and so uh wind up a lot wealthier again, so they benefit from the fruits of the labor of others. And then the higher I see, Okay, it's so it's college.

It's like college. Yeah. Now, if we find this new school of thought credible, then hierarchy and authoritarianism itself seemed not like the natural order of things, but more like a virus, one that was forcibly beaten down and almost wiped out for thousands of years, but persisted in some isolated corners until the development of agriculture and the evolution into larger, more organized societies provided it with a chance

to escape and replicate on a mass scale. Once more so, we always has had these sort of tendencies towards hierarchy and authoritarianism programmed into our brains, and for a long time we fought it in these tiny societies. But once we started building these larger societies, it's sort of escapes and kind of runs wild. It's almost like how measles was nearly wiped out by vaccines until enough dumb people stopped vaccinating their kids that it was able to spread

and get a toe hold again. Thank you, Jessica Bille, Thank you Jessica Bile. Some people might argue that hierarchy and authoritarianism and Jessica Bile make for stronger and more competitive societies, and that's why these forms of organizations spread across the globe. Yeah, that's certainly an arguable point. Deborah Rodgers and other researchers, however, have found in their research some data that would seem to argue against that point.

Quote in a demographic simulation that ohm Car desh Pondi, Marcus Feldman, and I conducted at Stanford University, California, we found that rather than imparting advantages to the group, unequal access to resources is inherently to stab realizing and greatly

raises the chance of group extinction and stable environments. This was true whether we modeled inequality as a multi tiered class society or what economists call a Peretto wealth distribution, in which as with the one percent, the rich get, the lions share. Counterintuitively, the fact that inequality was so destabilized and caused these societies to spread by creating an

incentive to migrate in search of further resources. The rules in our simulation did not allow from migration to already occupied locations, but it was clear that this would have happened in the real world, leading a conquest of the more stable egalitarian societies, exactly what we see as we

look back in history. In other words, inequality did not spread from group to group because it is an inherently better system for survival, but because it creates demographic instability, which drives migration and conflict and leads to the cultural

or physical extinction of egalitarian societies. And it's interesting if you look into like who a lot of the Europeans who sailed to the New World, as they called it, were there were a lot of second and third and fourth sons of wealthier emilies who like weren't going to inherit the family wealth and so had to go make their fortune elsewhere. So like this seems like a really

strongly arguable point to me. And it also it also feels more like this comparison that I keep making to a virus, because like the way virus is spread, they're not viruses aren't sustainable, they're not stable. They need to continually like destroy populations of of living things and need to spread to new populations in order to stay alive. So like I think authoritarianism, comparing it to a virus, I think there's a lot of Uh. I think it's

a useful way to look at it. Um. Yeah, yeah, so it's it's kind of weird that, Yeah, you don't really hear like social movements or trends ever referred to as a virus. I mean, I've never heard that comparison before. We talk about virility a lot when we talk about ideas, But yeah, I think looking at authoritaryianism virally um can spread much like a meme of a cat. Yeah, it does. It spreads just like a cat mame. Yeah, fascist dictatorships

spread like a cat mat a dictatorship. Right. Yeah. So uh obviously, like you know, we could try to like argue at which points in history authoritarianism hit its peak.

It's probably more apt to say that it ebbed and flowed in different places across distance and time, and every now and then individual societies would evolve like ancient Athens or the Iroquois, who established, you know, cultures that were more egalitarian than those around them, but in a global sense, strict hierarchy and authoritarian means of rule where the order of the day for the majority of people across the

last several thousand years. And again I'm I'm gonna oversimplify here because I'm not a historian and like this is not a historic like like like an academic paper, but I think it's fair to say broadly that the last eight hundred years or so have seen a major push back towards egalitarianism and against authoritarian means of control across

the globe. And if you're going to pick an arbitrary start point for this, you might choose the signing of the Magna Carta in June of twelve fifteen, and there would be a variety of other dates that would be important, like seventeen seventy six, uh, like eighteen sixty five, like nineteen really patriotic for a second there. And my my dates picked are very Western centric because I don't know

as much about like Chinese history, Japanese history. But you know, I think nineteen seventeen the Russian Revolution would be another point in that. Uh. And of course nineteen forty five would be another big moment in the sort of eight hundred year or so push back against authoritarianism. Um. And if we're going to keep rolling with my viral authoritarianism analogy, we might look at the global defeat of the ACCESS in World War two is equivalent to a max backs

in mass vaccination campaign. Uh. And if we want to extend the analogy even further, we could compare people like Cia or actor Alan Dulas and has been shant for authoritarian regime changes in Latin America to the anti vaxers like Jessica Bial people who saw socialism. Yeah. So Jessica Bill and Allan Dulas, who're the same fucking guy. Yeah damn. I would read that piece on medium dot com. Thank you,

thank you. Medium dot com is where it would put this if I weren't such a narcissist with a podcast. Um but he's dictatorship. You must put your call. You guys got to shame my meat. I'm calling hr Anderson. Yeah, so you've got like this. Uh so. Yeah. The last several decades of creeping authoritarianism in our own society have been driven in large part by the fact that decades of American leaders have supported dictators and strongman across places

like Latin America. The crisis of the Border, which provided such fuel to the American right, has been driven largely by refugees fleeing from places like Guatemala and El Salvador. Well, the US supported and trained death squads and assassinated democratically elected leaders. Um you could also make a point about our failure to intervene in Syria, all the refugees who fled from Bashar al Assad's fascistic campaign of extermination, and how that fueled the far right in Europe and in

the United States. Um So, the plight of those refugees, in their decision to flee the safety of the US, has invigorated a right wing movement that has grown stronger and more dangerous over the decades, starting with KKK border patrols in the nineteen seventies and ending with concentration camps in Texas and Donald Trump in the White House. Um, now, I'm not the only person thinking along lines similar to this when I was doing my final research for the

War on Everyone. The audio book that I swear is coming out soon. I just finished reading it. It's being edited. Yeah, it's being edited right now by the audio people. So, Daniel, Yeah, it is coming out. I came across this, Hey, Daniel, this It actually might be up at the time people listen to this episode. I don't know. Um. I came across a study of how fascists were using the internet back in the late nineties and early two thousands to

keep their movement alive. The starting study was written up by a researcher named Less Black, and in it he cites a book called A Thousand Plateaus Capitalism and Schizophrenia from six Now, the book was written by a pair of philosophers to Lose and Guitari and I don't pretend to understand the overall thrust of the text because I am so bad at reading political theory. But Black cites a piece of that book that seems to be making a similar argument to the one I've been making, albeit

with a slightly different analogy. Quote delusing Guitari argue that part of the nature of fascism is a proliferation of molecular focuses in interaction which skipped from point to point before beginning to resonate together. This comment might well have been made about the lateral connectedness found in cyberspace, rather than seeing fascism and shrined in a totalitarian bureaucracy. They argue that fascism was and is manifest in the micro

organization of everyday life. The power of fascist culture here is in its molecular and supple segmentarity, with flows capable of suffusing every cell. What makes fascism dangerous is its molecular or micro political power, for it is a mass movement of cancerous body rather than a totalitarian organism. Yeah, m all right, So I don't even really want to comment on that. I think it's it's deep. Yeah, yeah, anyway, that's what I got so far. Robert presented your worldviews

very suctinct. This was like Robert's ideology on life more or less Yeah, it's a fascism isn't something that's imposed from the top down. It's something that bubbles up from within groups of human beings. And if you're going to stop it, it requires constant vigilance, like the vigilance of say, a group of kung who makes sure to keep an eye out for a young man who gets too big of an idea of his own importance because it brought

down a fucking gazelle. And like a virus can move and change and and and go away, but you can come back, I mean, and you can you can basically erase the metaphor at that point of like, how like fascism is spreading like a virus now, because it's spreading like a virus in the Internet sense, to like it is truly one and the same. I think I will. Okay, So Robert, how do we how do we fix it? Yeah?

And uh, not hearing any answers. Well you know I didn't, you know, I only had so much time to comprehensive Well, you know, it does. That is a little bit of it, Sophie. Like one lesson we can take out of human prehistory in terms of how we fight fascism is that It's not something we fight by voting for the right person. It's something we fight on a day to day basis

in our daily lives. It's something we fight not just by keeping an eye out on other people, but by fighting the fascists within our own cell, by fighting like those authoritarian impulses and urges that we all have because it's coated into our brain. Um, it's it's a constant battle that starts at the bottom. And if it doesn't persist, and if there isn't discipline at every level of society to watch against it, it will come back terrifying. Okay, so the call has been coming from inside the house

the whole time. Call the fascism has been coming from inside your brain this whole time. Yeah, Okay, good gat good by, bolt Cutters. It's one tool that you can use against fascism, only brain out. I think that's really a good answer. Yeah, if we could just yank out the judge bitch cortex from our brain, Cutters, that's you're pretty close to some things. Kurt Vonnegutt was theorizing about near the end of his life. There he was like, if we were all just dumber, this would work so

much better. Yeah, it's like it's just everyone, just us to just get a light bother me. Yeah, being smart is not worth it. I don't happen to hold to that idea, but I'm willing to admit that Kurt Vonnegutt was way smarter than I will ever be, and he might have been right. So it's I mean, base level. I haven't revisited that phase of Kurt Kurt Vonnegut in a while, but sounds fun. But Robert, you wouldn't agree

with that because you are not a judge bitch. Well, I try not to be, but I will admit that I think when Kurt Vonnegutt was a judge bitch, he was right to be a judge bitch. Fair. I mean, yeah, I choose your moments. I'm constantly yeah, I mean constant suppression of the judge bitch within is necessary. I keep her loressed up. Yeah, I keep her locked up until necessary. Yeah,

But there are moments where it's like, oh, there she is. There, she's coming out wearing that outfit sometimes right, and doing that superhero pose, ready to save the fucking day. Well yeah, and it's it's like she has bolk cutters, she's got bold cutters. Yeah, they can be used for good or evil. Much like authoritarianism. It's not always the wrong thing like

we have it. Like, it's useful in certain situations. Um. You know, if you've got well, if you've got like a wildfire, you need one person being like okay, you go here, you go here, you go here, Like this is what we're going to try to do, like our podcast, like our podcast, or like a military unit, where to some extent there's certain kinds of hierarchy that you want in a military unit like our podcast, like our podcast,

or like uh uh, that's that's about it. Um. I don't think it's useful nearly as often as we use it, but it's not useless, but it has to be carefully controlled. Yeah okay, yeah, so like maybe if we're going to keep having presidents, we execute every president after they finish their term of office, and that way only people who are truly selfless take the job. Now we're out in the crazy crazy town. Yeah, it was like, well, now we're just shull. It's not the Hunger Games if you're

just killing the person at the top. True true, true, still not still not. Um, I've only seen the first one does it end well, that's right. Are the Hunger Games? A good idea for society is that the conclusion should get a shot, should give a shot, should be hunger someome games, but instead of children, it's like members of

the cabinet sick love it great? Oh now that would be amazing and at the end of like a presidential because like then I'd be really excited about some of the people who have been in Trump's cabinet because I would love to see Steven Miller and Steve Bannon fighting with like homemade spears over a pit of lava. Like it would be a blast. That would be the fucking greatest.

Jared Pushner would hide the whole time, and then somehow Win would hide the whole time five ft beneath the ground and which is zombie out of just a Banka Trump and the Betsy Divos just throttle each other with like fucking scarves or something. Yeah. That that that's fun. That's fun to think about. Reference It's almost like he's already got the graphic novel storyboarded. Yeah. I don't have more detailed solutions than that, but this is where my

thinking's gone in the last eighteen months or so. Of doing this podcast. So now you all have to deal with it too. Sorry, I know I think it's good. I think, well not the takeaways are dire. But yeah, I've never heard it put succinctly like that. Well, I don't know if i'd call it succinctly. I've been talking for fifty nine minutes or so. But I did my best. It was only one part. Yeah, it was only one part. Only one part. Well, I would not agree to do

two parts, Jamie. Wow. Yeah, no, I was forced into doing this one part. Well, I'm glad that you were unlike too, because this is just a whole new experience of Sophie've never had were we can just make eye rolls to each other directly and then say what we're thinking. I know, can you measure if Robert was here, Oh, I'd be I'd be I rolled into a coma by this unconscious. You would just be tied up. Yeah. We would have gone out onto the the Poisonous spell cat

for sure. Yeah, the poison room. I would have cracked it open with my podcasting machete, can't Yeah, you do have a machete. That's like that has says podcasting on the Blade. I am wearing my throwing Bagels behind the massa T shirt right now, so I need to get one of those. I have one for you. Oh yeah, I'm wearing my what if Fraser were a part of the Fantastic four T shirt today? I love what if Frasier were a part of the Fantastic Four. Well, that's

the very question this T shirt explores. Everyone think about that, and also, how do we fight against the monster coated into our brains? Hitler is almost inevitable? Yeah, both of those things, Yeah, in that order. Please have have the answers on my desk by Monday. If there's a better symbol for creeping authoritarianism in the human spirit than the television show Frasier, I haven't found it. Yeah, all right, Jamie,

you want to plug your plug doubles. Sure you can listen to the Bechdel Cast every Thursday Feminist Movie podcast, or follow me on Twitter at Jamie Loft His Help, or come see my show at Edinburgh Fringe Fest in Scotland all August. Yeah, and uh, Sophie, you want to plug my plug doubles because you're on the thing too and we have the same podcast. Well, um, I didn't agree to that in my contract, but follow Robert on Twitter, I write, Okay, thank you didn't discussing. I mean, I

just think we could have titled it better. Um at bastards Pod on Twitter and Instagram behind the Bastard's dot com for the sources for this pod t public. We have t shirts, we have totes, we have phone cases, we have um not bolt cutters but soon to be bolt cutters. We have we have, we have, we have a couple. We have a couple of new new designs up there, so check it out. Good stuff and they

have sales like all the time. Yeah, and you can find Sophie on Twitter at at Bastard's pod because she runs the Twitter So if you want to tell her to be less or more mean to me, you can let her know the direct channel. But in reality, don't do that. Don't do that. Uh and but do yeah, maybe get some bolt cutters, um. Certainly keep an eye out for creeping authoritarianism in your own daily life and

try to shame some meat on your way home. If you'd like to humble Robert, please find me on Instagram at so underscore right Underscore up Underscore Sunshine and let me know your opinions on Robert, so I can tell it to him to its face and make sure that's great that he doesn't know the size of his I don't want to say meat because I don't instagram and get or shame shame. Let's go shame, Let's go shame. I don't want to say I don't like I just

don't enjoy the phrase size of meat in general. No, I think that a meat shaming T shirt is called for at this point. Yeah, yeah, there was serious Robert influences here. The meat shaming story really is? That is gonna so Texas. It's fucking amazing. Yeah. Yeah, one of those things I read a while back and has stuck with me ever since. They should turn it into a children's book. They should the shame of the meat with uh, what's that? What's that? Curious chimpanzee? He seems like the

right character for that. Yeah, are you referring to George? Yeah, George, if you'd like to keep my meat big, please message me and tell me how cute my dog is there. All right, Well, this has been a rambling enough exit the episodes done, go yeah, buy it? I love you.